Radio 3's Beethoven Experience

Happening right now on BBC Radio 3 is The Beethoven Experience, a five-day radio marathon during which the station will play every piece of music Beethoven wrote. It started on Sunday and will finish at midnight on Friday. See the Radio 3 site for more info. You can listen online and even download all nine of the symphonies, once they've been broadcast.

This is the first time I've knowingly listened to Beethoven and I've liked it more than I thought I would. The music is very lively, with melodic and harmonic surprises at every turn. It's not music for lifts.

The 2nd Symphony did send me to sleep last night. But then it seems to be the nature of classical music, that even 'livelier' pieces like this work on the brain and not the heart (unlike beat-driven modern music), in ways I'm not really familiar with yet. It seems I can work to it, or fall asleep to it, as if it's not there. But as I've found with the Messiaen I've been listening to, the more you get to know a piece of music, the more sense it makes and the more it comes into the foreground.